John McIntyre, whom James Wolcott calls "the Dave Brubeck of the art and craft of copy editing," writes on language, editing, journalism, and other manifestations of human frailty. Comments welcome. Identifying his errors relieves him of the burden of omniscience. Write to jemcintyre@gmail.com, befriend at Facebook, or follow at Twitter: @johnemcintyre. Back 2009-2012 at the original site, http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/ and now at www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/.

Monday, December 21, 2015

Distinguishing among distinctions

I
have begun work on a new workshop in which I will attempt to sort out
distinctions of usage worth preserving from traditional distinctions that are
no longer worth the candle.

It
will focus on pairs, rather than distinctions among the senses of individual
words. For example:

careen/career

comprise/compose

imply/infer

loath/loathe

(I’m
not giving away in advance where I stand on any of these.)

While
I have materials for a good start on the project, I would welcome your
suggestions of distinctions you would like to see addressed, whether to
preserve or to abandon.

Please feel free to make suggestions in the comments
here or in a private message to me at jno_mcintyre@yahoo.com.

11 comments:

An editor's view:Careen/career: Learned it, but never cared or enforced it. "Careen" is ubiquitous and causes me no discomfort at all.Comprise/compose: Learned and followed it, but "It comprises" is probably a lost cause; "comprised of" may be skunked, but it's winning.Imply/infer: A distinction I would keep if it were possible. Loath/loathe: Strikes me as essentially a spelling problem (that is, nobody who goofs on it is actually using the wrong part of speech).

Your mention of a workshop suggests that there might really be two questions here. Should editors _know_ these distinctions? And assuming they do, should they enforce them? For the first, I would say that an editor should be aware of the distinctions, and where the thinking currently stands on such distinctions. An editor's credibility might slip somewhat if they are unaware that there is a distinction between "careen" and "career," or about the brouhaha about "comprised of" that erupted last year on Wikipedia, or that "beg the question" has a specific meaning in rhetoric.

Armed with the knowledge of these things, the editor then has to help decide (assuming a locally governing style guide doesn't dictate the decision). And for those, and assuming my own context (technical writing/editing):

lie/lay: yes. (Tho I would never, ever suggest that this distinction needs to be upheld in anything but formal prose)singular "they": nothat/which: no, probably. Tho I still make the change reflexively.

As someone who has both written and edited text, but is neither professionally, I wouldn't change any of these in someone else's text, though I stick to the so-called traditional distinctions in my own writing, and even though I know perfectly well that some of them have no historical foundation.

You Don't Say

About the Author

John E. McIntyre, a veteran editor and teacher, is back in harness. He worked for nearly 23 years at The Baltimore Sun, for 14 of those years as head of its copy desk, and, after a one-year hiatus, has returned as night content production editor. He has taught copy editing at Loyola of Maryland since 1995. He was the second president of the American Copy Editors Society, serving two terms, and he has been a consultant on writing and editing at publications in the United States and Canada.